Is there method in this madness? Context, play, and laughter in Plato's Symposium and Republic

Abstract

Where there is madness in Plato, method lurks. In its modern guise, method is designed to establish philosophy as a science by determining procedures in advance that ensure objectivity. Modern method permits no madness. Yet another, older, less rigid, but no less rigorous sense of method resonates in the Greek word, which means "a following after" and points not to a fixed set of rules but to a path, an, a way. Although he has no method in the modern sense, Plato surely has a way, a path of thinking that finds expression not in a metaphysical system of doctrines, but in living dialogues between individual characters animated by an erotic desire to weave the ideas of the good, the beautiful, and the just into the fabric of human community. By writing this erotic desire, this madness, into the dialogues, Plato at once subverts the authority of his own texts and infuses them with an openness that not only resists calcification into dogma but also provokes the very critical, philosophical attitude modeled in the dialogues themselves. To discern this method of madness in Plato, we must attend to the madness of which Socrates speaks in the Phaedrus: it is not the madness of mental deficiency, or of divine prophecy, or indeed of poetic inspiration; rather, it is the madness associated with eros that playfully awakens human souls to the life of philosophy and touches on something of the truth.1 Dimensions of this sort of erotic madness can be found in the dramatic contexts in which the dialogues are situated, in the playful spirit with which they are enacted and the laughter that often resonates through them. Ironically enough, these dimensions of erotic madness take on methodological import in precisely those dialogues that many commentators identify with the "middle period" of Plato's thinking-the period in which Plato allegedly moves away from his teacher, Socrates, and develops the metaphysical system associated with "Platonism." 2 In what follows, I trace the method of madness at work in two dialogues usually associated with this "middle period"-the Symposium and Republic-by highlighting three strategies Plato uses to subvert dogmatism, inspire critical self-reflection, and model the sort of philosophical activity capable of transforming the world of human community. The first is a distancing strategy. The concrete contexts in which Plato situates the dialogues establish critical distance in two interrelated ways. On one hand, these contexts distance Plato from his own writing in such a way that every attempt to ascribe unequivocally any of the views brought forth in the dialogues to Plato himself is confounded. On the other hand, the dramatic contexts render ambiguous the manner in which the text is received, generating a distance between text and reader that demands critical consideration. Thus, the contexts undermine the authority of both author and text in such a way that the reader is forced to approach the text with precisely the heightened presence of mind with which Plato expects the philosopher to engage the world. The second strategy is grounding: by situating the dialogues in specific social and political contexts with real historical characters who defend positions of great currency, Plato is able to ground philosophy firmly in the contingent world of human community. This gives the philosophical ideas presented in the text a sense of urgency, legitimacy, and particularity that mitigates against the attempt to distill from them an abstract set of universal doctrines. The third strategy is demonstrative: the play, irony, and laughter found in the dialogues add determinate philosophical content to the discussions themselves. This sort of play is demonstrative in the sense that it shows what cannot be said either directly by any of the characters or by the author himself. Together the distancing, grounding, and demonstrative strategies are aspects of a highly sophisticated methodological approach that both circumvents a range of metaphilosophical problems and fosters the sort of philosophical openness that lies at the heart of Plato's teaching. As Charles Griswold has suggested, modern treatises on method are metaphilosophical insofar as they seek to address the very conditions under which rigorous philosophical investigation can be undertaken.3 Thus, in prefaces and prolegomena, modern philosophers, speaking in their own names, seek to philosophize about how to philosophize, to reason about the limits of reason. In so doing, however, they inevitably either fall into an infinite regress-for metaphilosophical reasoning remains itself a form of philosophical reasoning-or beg the question-for the metaphilosophical principles they allegedly discover are presumptively posited as the very objective principles they seek.4 This sort of philosophizing before beginning to philosophize is absent in Plato because it is unnecessary. Philosophy has always already begun at the very beginning of a Platonic dialogue. There is no question begging because the metaphysical principles are always introduced hypothetically and couched within a determinate context that undermines every attempt to render them objective and universal. There is no infinite regress because these contexts carry with them their own set of themes and assumptions and so provide their own starting points. Yet for all this, there remains the demonstrative dimension of the dialogues in which something like a Platonic position begins to reveal itself not through what is said directly by any of the characters, but through what the action of the dialogues themselves shows. To borrow Wittgensteinian vocabulary: the Symposium and Republic show what cannot be said.5 They embody a philosophical openness that is irreducible to systematic dogma. This openness is at the core of Plato's method. To focus philosophically on the playful dimensions of Plato's writing is thus not to deny that Plato has a definitive teaching; rather, it is to recognize that this teaching itself had to be expressed in a playful manner. By delineating how the distancing and grounding methodological strategies dovetail with the playful dimensions of the Symposium and Republic, a method in Plato will begin to come into focus that not only addresses important metaphilosophical concerns regarding beginnings in philosophy, but also establishes a powerful-because fundamentally open-philosophical position. Copyright © 2007 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.